Date nights - how to create a schedule and sticking to it - this topic always makes me smile.
My very good friend and colleague always used to tell parents they need to have a weekly date night with their partner.
That would be amazing, but in real life, if you are a parent or caregiver, weekly date nights do not work. Once a month might even be pushing it 🙂
Anyway, date nights with our partners are essential. There are different reasons why it is important, but it all comes down to helping you:
Maintain a happy and healthy relationship.
It gives you time to communicate with your partner.
Spend quality time together (without the kids), and just check in with each other.
Raising children comes with many challenges, and therefore it’s good if we can take some time to keep our relationship with our partner strong.
Most families have relatively busy lives. Regardless of whether one parent or both parents work fulltime or parttime, there is always jobs at home to do and between work, school and everyday life, time flies.
Date nights are great, but we don’t want it to cause more stress in our lives. Therefore, we need to make sure our expectations are reasonable.
Have a chat to your partner and see what you can come up with.
Maybe you agree on a date night once a month or even every other month, where you go out and leave the children with a family member or babysitter.
Perhaps even that is too much and you want to try once every 3 months.
That does not mean you cannot catch up or spend some quality time together more often than that. You could perhaps have the “going out” date night once every 3 months and you can plan it and look forward to it together!
Then you could have a set time once a week or once every 2 weeks where you have a glass of wine together when the kids have gone to bed.
Date nights don’t have to be extravagant, they can be simple.
When you have decided will work for you and your partner, schedule it. Whether you had a note on the fridge or book it into your calendar, that’s fine. Schedule it, though, so that this does not only stay an intention, but it could actually happen from now on.
Set some rules for yourselves - perhaps something like you’re not allowed to talk about work. Or perhaps that is exactly what you need to talk about it and you never get time to do it.
It might feel a bit strange at first. It’s quite an adjustment to have only each other’s company without a kid interrupting! It takes some getting used to.
Just enjoy the time together and remember, you might have some discussions where you do not agree with what the other person is saying. It is okay to agree to disagree. All of a sudden you will have some set times for good chats and quality time together
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Nurturing your relationship with your partner is important. Schedule your date nights and make a note in your Tracto journal of your plans and how you feel after spending quality time with your significant other.
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